Portuguese settlement in Chittagong
16th and 17th century Portuguese trading port
Chittagong, the second largest city and main port of Bangladesh, was home to a thriving trading post of the Portuguese Empire in the East in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Portuguese first arrived in Chittagong around 1528, and left in 1666 after the Mughal conquest. It was the first European colonial enclave in the historic region of Bengal.
Etymology
Chittagong was the largest seaport in the Sultanate of Bengal, which was termed as the "Shahi Bangalah" (Imperial Bengal) in Persian and Bengali. The Portuguese referred to the port city as Porto Grande de Bengala, which meant "the Grand Harbor of Bengal". The term was often simplified as Porto Grande.
History
Arrival of the Portuguese
On 9 May 1518, a fleet of four ships commanded by João da Silveira from the Estado da India arrived in Chittagong from Goa. They were followed by several embassies from the Kingdom of Portugal to the Sultanate of Bengal, then reputed as the wealthiest region in the Indian subcontinent. He set up the first Portuguese factory in Bengal at Chittagong in 1517. Traders from Portuguese Malacca, Bombay and Ceylon also frequented the region.
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This entry incorporates text from “Portuguese settlement in Chittagong” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.